0.7 Development Update 31 and an Important Poll

Hey, folks!

Been a month since the last Dev Update. Had a lot of polls and updates and specials in the meantime.

By the way! The Halloween Special is done! If you were eligible for the rewards, you should have received an email last Wednesday, but in case you didn't, just use the same folder link. You will find the finished "flat" and the VR versions of Rae's animation inside! We've actually rented two extra render farm instances to get it finished before the Valentine Special. Didn't want to ask you folks to splurge on another special while you haven't yet received the rewards from the previous one. Once again, sorry for the delay!

Speaking of which.

Valentine Special - Erotic Estates Artbook

...is now available! In full! If you are pledged to Friend or Resident, you can get it there right now - ➡️https://rift.ink/418FamR 

We're still going to revise some bits and add some bonus content to it. Stuff like the animation loops for all the artworks, yeah?

Just make sure to be subscribed to Friend or Resident tiers on February 28th to get the permanent links to all the content and any additional goodies should there be some. Patreon force-enabled the subscription system update, and we can no longer reliably collect the list of eligible Patrons from the special offer feature. It was a shitshow in November when we had more than a hundred eligible people missing from the exported list. So this time we're doing it manually and we will be making a snapshot on Feb 28th.

v0.7.17

Is currently in Beta and available here - ➡️https://rift.ink/4gMpwDq 

Cait returns to her normal (but you may see her don her goth outfit for some special events in the future!) self, you get to grope Blair and make Lyriel show her tongue.

The Early Access version should be out soon, Friday if we don't run into any major bugs. Could be delayed until Mon/Tue if there are some. And it will have the first expansion of the Alchemy Minigame!

We'll start by adding three potions, two of those will have more or less the same effect as the ones in the Lost and Found event, and one completely new potion. Then we'll keep adding recipes and effects, and some will be coming with special animations, as voted by you.

Gameplay Polls

Speaking of your votes. We've had three major polls this year already. Let's go over those.

First one was the poll about Minigames ➡️https://rift.ink/3Qq3xXX 

The "Make alchemy repeatable, add more like it, and go all out" option won by a lot. So we're doing just that. Alchemy is first, then I believe I already showed you an early prototype for the closet search minigame. We'll pick it up again soon-ish, but we might do a detour to a simpler minigame before that. I'll talk about it when we get to it.

The second major poll was about Small Actions ➡️https://rift.ink/3Qq3yet 

The "More and bigger! Up to and including sex quickies and the like" option won by even larger margin in this one. We haven't got to the "sex quickies" part yet, but we're already up to eight of the girls' occupations covered by Actions, and we have another batch ready to go in the future updates. We're almost certainly going to make Actions 2.0 with more apparent progression, more options and better balance. And there's going to be a sex poll specifically for the Actions sex quickies soon!

The third major poll was about Cinematic Sex Scene Animations ➡️https://rift.ink/3Qq3yuZ 

This one was a bit confusing. The winning option is "More long animations, add some to the House girls", but it's not really a clear winner, with a few other options getting at least half as much votes each. What's more, almost all of the comments were against the idea of going hard (heh) on the cinematic animations. One thing was clear, most everyone wants animated endings for the sex scene, so we're going to do our best to provide. Other than that, we'll see how it goes.

Thoughts and another Important Poll

Quite a few of the comments you left on the gameplay polls mentioned the impact of the new features on the story progress in one way or another. And here's the funny thing. Making more minigames and actions and animations may actually improve our story pacing and progress. Let me explain.

As we get further into the girls' personal stories, we're digging ever deeper into their backstories and we have to take them to new places, meet new (to us) people and engage in spirited activities. Same goes for the main story. That means that we have to make new environments, design (or in some cases redesign) new characters, create props, and generally spend quite a bit of time on making sure it all fits.

Case in point - the The Heist. The whole story arc was originally scheduled to be completed in August, September at the latest. We had to make a huge new environment, lots of props and characters: the Hidden Archive itself, the elevator room with all the puzzles, the corridors surrounding it, the student guards, the overly friendly plant, and a lot more. We had to design and code all the puzzles. We had to write 25000 (I just checked) words for all the interactions and dialogues.

And we kinda did it all, but while we were doing it all we had to put out the monthly updates as well. So we had to write those, we had to make new renders, sometimes we needed new environments and props even for the semi-filler scenes. And yeah, I'll be honest, sometimes we do add some scenes just to pad out the update. We still try to make those scenes as fun as we can, but still. Anyway, in the end we had to delay the The Heist event until December.

So why am I talking about it now? The thing is, we could have done it way earlier if we could skip even a single update and concentrate on finishing the big quest. The unfortunate thing is, I'm not sure we can risk starting skipping the updates now even if it would lead to better story progress overall. We've been doing monthly updates for almost six years now, and we're seeing subscription dips even when there is a release if it's not a very exciting one. We have a whole team now that depends on the Patreon income, so, yeah... 

Here's where the minigames and actions come in. You seem to like them , and if you folks are fine with it, we could alternate between releasing a story update and an update consisting only of a minigame update, a few action sets and a sex scene, for example. That way we won't have to pad out the storylines and make filler-ish content, and in turn, this will allow us to plan ahead better. That said,  we really need to know if you're actually going to be okay with that. 

So please vote in the poll below, it'll really help us define our priorities. I'll make the poll multi-choice once again, so mark all the options you are okay with.

Regardless of the poll outcome we'll have some cool story content for you in the 0.7.18! 

I'll talk about it in the next dev update, hopefully before it goes to Alpha.

Goodies

Oh, and we have a little goodie for you - Cait having a protein-rich breakfast. 

Art by RADON - https://x.com/radon1014

Grab the full-res versions in the attchments.

Don't forget to vote.

And see you soon!